Is ChatGPT Pro Worth It? Features, Pricing, and Comparison

As a tech writer, I get asked every day whether I think ChatGPT is going to take my job away.

ChatGPT’s new agent announcement made a big splash, so I decided to take a deep dive into all of ChatGPT’s plans and features, focusing on the Pro plan – the most expensive plan for individuals like me – in particular.

Below, you’ll learn:

• How much the Pro plan costs and what you actually get
• What other plans ChatGPT offers (including what you can get for Free)
• The pros and cons of each plan
• What ChatGPT can’t do that other AI tools can

How Much Does ChatGPT Pro Cost?

ChatGPT Pro costs $200 per month, billed monthly. OpenAI currently does not support annual billing (and you can’t pay multiple months in advance) for any plan except Team. For a small business user like me who would rather pay upfront to get a discount, that’s annoying.

Here’s a quick overview of ChatGPT’s other packages as a benchmark:

Monthly:

• ChatGPT Plus: $20 per month
• ChatGPT Team: $30 per user per month
• ChatGPT Enterprise: Doesn’t have public-facing pricing. You have to talk to a rep to get a custom quote.

Annual:

• ChatGPT Team: $25 per user per month.

All ChatGPT Paid Pricing Plans and Features (Including Pro)

ChatGPT has several paid plans designed for individuals and teams, each with different features, usage limits, and price points.

Here, I’ve broken down what each plan includes, along with the pros and cons that I can see, plus recent feedback from Reddit. Hopefully, this will give you a clearer picture of which plan (if any) might be right for you. First up, the individual plans, starting with ChatGPT Pro.

For Individuals

ChatGPT Pro

Best for: ChatGPT users who want to run research-heavy workflows, build custom tools, and want beta access to ChatGPT’s newest tools.

Features

• Unlimited access to basically all of ChatGPT’s available models: GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, OpenAI o3, OpenAI o1-pro, OpenAI o4-mini-high, and OpenAI o4-mini, giving you the flexibility to pick the right tool for the job, whether it’s creating videos, translating text, generating blog post outlines, or debugging or reviewing code.
• Custom GPTs, i.e., your own versions of ChatGPT that you can share with others.
• Access to ChatGPT agent, which can take care of online tasks (booking a hotel, blocking your calendar, running a competitor analysis) for you. Pro comes with 400 messages per month.
• 125 Deep Research tasks per month, plus an additional 125 tasks per month if you use the lightweight version.
• Unlimited images and video (aka Sora, which is not available on ChatGPT Free or Enterprise accounts).
• Reference chat history, so you can get more relevant responses to new questions.
• Prioritized traffic without peak hour limits, helping you get the answers, blog posts, research, and analysis you need faster.
• Preview of Codex agent, which can write code, answer questions about your codebase, and fix bugs.

Pros

• Virtually unlimited use. This plan has the highest limits of all, so if you’re a researcher, developer, or content creator who is already using ChatGPT for hours a day and running up against your limits, Pro can offer you a lot of freedom. One Reddit user who is thinking about moving away from Pro because of the cost says, “Considering going back to Plus, but I think about staying on Pro and eating the cost all the time. It feels so good to not be limited.” For me, the extra Deep Research queries are a major advantage when I’m trying to find up-to-date stats, product reviews, or want to confirm my understanding of a complex topic so that I can write confidently about it.
• Expanded access to Sora. You get 1080p resolution for 20-second-long videos and can generate up to 5 videos concurrently without a watermark. Once your video is generated, you can re-cut, remix, blend, and loop your videos. For me, this could be a cool way to differentiate my clients’ social media posts or even make their webpages pop.
• Priority access to new features. OpenAI considers people on the Pro plan power users and wants them to test out new features first. In my mind, getting to try new features is a pretty great perk – I can start building completely new kinds of workflows before other people even know it’s possible.

Cons

• API usage is not included. OpenAI has its own separate API pricing plan based on the model(s) you want to use. This may or may not be a big deal depending on how much data you’re pulling in or sending out. To save on costs, you could use the company’s Batch API to run tasks asynchronously over 24-hour periods.
• Poor reliability. Paradoxically, users paying for Pro have reported that the experience can be less stable with the new “Pro-only” models. “I miss o1 pro mode because o3 pro is INSANELY SLOWER. Nearly everything I’ve asked has taken over 20 minutes to respond! Where o1 pro rarely took over five minutes and usually much less. I do not believe o3 pro is doing five times the work.” (Reddit)
• Takes a long time for images and videos to load. Even OpenAI admits, “During peak hours, all users, including those on Pro plans, may experience wait times of up to several hours,” in its help docs. I’ve noticed Reddit users complaining: “It’s been so slow it's unusable. You can’t even enter text without it taking forever. The app still responds quickly, but using a PC is pretty much impossible. You’d think they would fix this, but it’s been going on for weeks now.” 
• ChatGPT agent has limited connections. While OpenAI is likely on track to add more, there are only basic connections to tools like Google Drive, HubSpot, Canva, and SharePoint, and not all of them are available to use in Chat search. One G2 user says, “I wish there were more built-in integrations with third-party tools without needing to use the API or plugins.” ChatGPT agent doesn’t have multimodal support either, so it can’t analyze visual PDFs, screenshots, or other images. You can build your own Connectors, but that’s something I’d probably want an engineer to help me with. 

ChatGPT Plus

Best for: Users who need to upload files, code, or do light research but don’t need full-scale usage or premium access to all models and agents.

Features

• 5x the Free plan access to GPT-4o, with file uploads, data analysis, search, and vision.
• 5 Deep Research tasks per month.
• Unlimited access to GPT-4.1-mini, which is ideal for coding, parsing dense text (legal, tax), and extracting key pieces of information from enormous files.
• You can share projects with up to 20 files.
• Access to standard and advanced voice mode.
• ChatGPT agent with 40 messages/month.
• Access to a research preview of GPT‑4.1 for coding tasks.
• Access to Sora, but more limited than Pro: 5-second videos at 720p or 10-second videos at 480p, with up to 2 concurrent generations.

Pros

• It’s cheap. Though it has fewer features than the Pro plan, it’s also 10x cheaper. If you’re not as experienced with gen AI and are trying to figure out the best ways to use it in your business, you may not need all of the functionality the Pro plan provides.
• It’s still pretty powerful. Unless you’re using ChatGPT to analyze huge docs, do a ton of Deep Research queries, or look across your entire codebase, it’s going to accelerate everyday tasks tremendously. For example, one Redditor used it to create a custom quoting engine: “$20/mo has been easy to justify for how much I get done. I meet with clients, move the whole thing into their project as a dated document, and have a scope of work written instantly. Throw that into the model I made based on our pricing from a couple dozen estimates from previous jobs and bam, [I have] a ballpark estimate.”

Cons

• You have to manually turn training off. I didn’t realize this until someone else pointed it out to me. One Reddit user seemed to be similarly surprised: “Crazy that data privacy is a paid feature and not just an expectation.” To turn it off, you have to go into Settings > Data Controls > toggle “Improve the model for everyone” off.
• Usage limits. According to OpenAI’s knowledge base, Plus subscriptions “may include usage limits such as message caps, especially during high demand. These limits may vary based on system conditions.” I’ve experienced this – and it often happens at really inopportune times, like when I’m making the last few edits on a ghostwritten LinkedIn post that my client wants to get out the door. Though it usually only takes a few refreshes to get right back into prompting, it’s still an annoying setback.
• ChatGPT agent connectors are limited to Deep Research. You can’t ask ChatGPT to look through Dropbox files, your Google Calendar, or even other Custom Connectors you’ve built unless you’re using the Deep Research functionality (which takes longer to load).

For Teams

ChatGPT Team

Best for: Small teams (2+ users) who want to share chats and GPTs.

Features

Has everything in Pro, plus*:

• More security features, like SAML SSO, MFA, admin console, SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, and domain verification.
• A dedicated workspace, with shared edit access to custom GPTs (up to 100 editors)
• Connectors to internal knowledge tools, like SharePoint, GitHub, Google Drive, and Dropbox.
• Study mode.
• ChatGPT agent 40 messages/month or 30 credits/message if using flexible pricing.

*The ChatGPT Team plan has less access to Sora than the Pro plan. You can only create 5-second videos at 720p or 10-second videos at 480p, with up to 2 concurrent generations.

Pros

• OpenAI doesn’t use your data for training purposes by default, and encrypts at rest and in transit.
• Sharing projects and custom GPTs. If you’re working on, say, a marketing team, you could create one GPT for highly product-focused content, another for writing more formal content like press releases, and another for generating new and interesting ideas and let everyone on your team use them simultaneously. You can also share a project that you’re working on with your colleagues, and upload up to 40 files as reference context.
• Admin features. This plan comes with bulk member management so you can add or remove users when needed, and also gives you insight into how people are using ChatGPT with GPT analytics and management.

Cons

• You may need to add credits. Though you do get what OpenAI calls “generous access to advanced models,” Team users receive per-seat limits for all advanced features. If someone exceeds their limit, they can draw more credits from the Team’s shared pool (or buy more).
• Poor memory. Even with a 32K context window, some users report issues with ChatGPT’s processing. For example: “I’m getting so fed up with the limitations on my Team account. Doc review takes forever, is wrong more often, forgets docs that I upload in minutes sometimes, and the hallucinations are worse than ever.” (Reddit)
• Not as much collaboration as you might think. While you can share custom GPTs and chats, the Teams plan doesn’t function like a truly interactive tool, such as Google Docs or Figma, where you can leave comments for other users or work simultaneously. “The ChatGPT Teams version comically actually has no collaboration capabilities. For the extra $5 a month there are some other benefits, but they have nothing to do with collaboration.” (Reddit)

ChatGPT Enterprise

Best for: Large teams (150+ users) who want to share chats and custom GPTs.

Features

Has everything in Team, plus:

• Expanded context window in GPT‑4o, so you can have longer inputs and upload larger files.
• Enhanced support, with a dedicated onboarding team and access to AI advisors “for eligible customers” (not super clear what that means from the ChatGPT pricing page).
• Enhanced security, with SCIM, RBAC, an internal analytics dashboard, and a compliance API.
• Flexible invoicing with volume discounts and ACH billing.
• Custom legal terms.

Pros

• Fast response times. OpenAI places the highest priority on Enterprise customer plans with 24/7 support and SLAs (it doesn’t say what the SLAs are in their public-facing pricing, but I assume they are negotiated during the sales cycle).
• OpenAI doesn’t use your data for training purposes. Like the Team plan, this is deactivated by default.
• Security. Enterprise plans come with a custom security review, custom data retention policies, encryption at rest and in transit, and data residency in the US, Europe, Japan, Canada, Korea, Singapore, and India.

Cons

• Not eligible for Sora access. Enterprise users can’t create or edit videos using ChatGPT.
• Does not come with access to ChatGPT agent at the time of this writing, meaning that, without using API calls, you can’t push or pull data from the tools you use day-to-day. The Enterprise plan also doesn’t come with memory of past chats. 
• Some features have limited usage. Advanced voice, GPT-4o, and GPT-4.1-mini usage “must be reasonable and comply with our policies.”
• You may need to buy extra credits to use GPT-4.1, OpenAI o3, OpenAI o4-mini, OpenAI o3-pro, the Codex agent research preview, and Deep Research. Credits expire monthly, unless you’ve negotiated otherwise with the OpenAI sales team.
• Limited sharing. Though you can share Advanced Data Analysis chats with other people in your org, the person you share with won’t be able to access the original uploaded file (just the conversation). You also can’t share a chat with an image in it, whether you uploaded it yourself or ChatGPT generated it for you.

ChatGPT Free vs. ChatGPT Pro: Do You Really Need to Pay?

The free ChatGPT plan is so popular because it includes most of the tool’s key functionality. But like any freemium product, it’s got tradeoffs designed to nudge you into a paid plan.

What You Get with a Free ChatGPT Account

Many kinds of professionals – from small business owners to VPs at large companies – find that the free ChatGPT plan meets most of their needs. It can:

• Access the GPT‑4.1 mini model for unlimited basic chats
• Search the web
• Edit their code
• Look for patterns in datasets
• Create images
• Let you create custom GPTs that match your style guide

But the ChatGPT Free plan has some hard limitations.

For one, you can only use GPT-4o a few times in the span of 5 hours – and you won’t know you’ve hit your limit until an error message appears. If you want to continue working in ChatGPT, you have to use a less powerful model like GPT-4o mini, which may not give you the depth of summary, research, or extraction that you need.

The Free plan is also a lot slower. On ChatGPT’s pricing page, they say the Free plan is “limited on bandwidth
& availability. It also has a much smaller context window (aka memory): only 8K compared to the Pro plan’s 128K, a 16x difference. On the Pro plan, your answers, written content, and agent actions will be way more tailored to your style, past chats, and preferences.

What Does ChatGPT Pro Offer That the Free Version Doesn’t?

ChatGPT Free is ideal if you’re using it to reword a few emails, quickly double-check your code, run a competitor analysis, or whip up a quick banner for a LinkedIn post. But the slowness and limitations may hold you back from doing more strategic work and fully integrating it into your day-to-day tasks.

Unlike the Free version, Pro includes:

• Fully unlocked Deep Research (Free users are limited to 5 lightweight Deep Research queries per month)
• Unlimited access to o1 and o3‑pro and a 128K token context window, making long, complex tasks possible
• ChatGPT agent
• Voice and video use 
• Priority access to new features
• Faster performance
• Much higher message limits

You might want to consider ChatGPT Pro if you need to do things like:

• Parse long vendor contracts for key risks
• Write multiple grant applications at once using Deep Research to find hints from previous applicants on Reddit and other forums
• Use voice mode to verbally explore ideas on the go
• Create FAQs or SOPs based on messy documentation uploads
• Refactor code and generate test cases across your entire codebase
• Share custom GPTs across your team and use ChatGPT agent to perform online tasks for you

So, Is ChatGPT Pro Worth It?

ChatGPT Pro is a solid gen AI tool if you’re an individual who:

• Needs to generate their own unique videos and images
• Wants to do deep research or analysis without switching between tabs
• Wants to use AI for content generation (emails, blogs, LinkedIn posts, web copy)
• Is comfortable writing prompts, refining outputs, and building agents from scratch
• Has the time to experiment

But if you’re managing a team – or want to run a team but don’t have the budget to hire people – ChatGPT Pro doesn’t scale.

The work still depends on someone opening a chat window, thinking through the right instructions, and checking the results. Even custom GPTs and ChatGPT agent rely on manual prompts and expensive API calls.

ChatGPT doesn’t just know that you want a daily summary of your upcoming meetings sent to you at 6am PT every day. You have to tell it. And that creates more work for you, not less.

What to Try Instead: AI Employees

Motion gives you one cohesive unit of helpful assistants right out of the box.

You don’t have to share context about your business, explain how to research, how to follow up on cold leads, how to write an SEO-friendly blog, or respond nicely to an enraged customer – and then go paste the ultimate result you got into some other tool. Motion’s AI employees already know how to do what you need done.

And with hundreds of built-in connections (think: Airtable, Apollo, Attio, Brex, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack, and Zendesk), Motion’s AI employees can start pulling and pushing data from your existing systems on day one. No need to bother your eng team or tinker with Zapier.

Plus:

Each OOTB AI Employee is Fully Configurable

Motion plans come with multiple AI agents built and tested specifically for sales (Chip), marketing (Suki), support (Clide), project management (Millie), executive assistant (Alfred), recruiting (Dot), and research (Spec) – with more to come soon.

Each of these employees can be tailored to your specific workflows and preferences. You can add or remove steps, adjust tone and formatting, or set up advanced behavior just by typing in plain English.

You Can Share AI Employee Skillsets Or Keep Them Private

Motion gives you control over which skillsets get shared without forcing you to start from scratch every time.

So, if you want to train a version of Clide on your product and documentation, you can share that across the org. But if you want to customize your own version of Alfred, Motion’s AI executive assistant, to your unique writing style and scheduling preferences, you can keep those skills to yourself.

You Can Build Your Own AI Employees

On Motion’s Enterprise plan, you can create whatever kind of employee you’d ideally hire.

Mix and match different skills (which Motion has already picked an ideal AI model for), pull/send data from other tools, set up recurring tasks, and adjust prompts based on what you want the employee to do.

If you’re more technical, you can even add your own HTML blocks. 

Stay Organized From the Jump

If you’re already using Motion’s project management features, like Gantt charts, capacity planning, task prioritization, and knowledge management, your AI agents will know, and continue to learn:

• How your team works
• What documentation is most relevant to your workflows
• Everyone’s scheduling preferences and bandwidth
• What tasks are highest priority

If you’re a ChatGPT power user who doesn’t mind setting up all of your workflows from scratch and wants to get access to the latest and greatest features first, ChatGPT Pro delivers.

But if you’re like me – trying to serve more clients, run a team without increasing headcount, and reclaim precious hours in your day – a full suite of Motion AI employees that come ready to work is the way to go.